What satisfaction can there be in the torturing of a withered stump which is dumb to all outrage?—it is as fruitless a business as flogging a corpse!
The old squire did not demean himself by a single outcry of pain.
When they wanted him to confess that the gentry had banded together to extirpate the peasantry, he coldly replied:
"That is not true."
Every denial on his part was followed by inhuman tortures. But they were but tormenting a frigid skeleton insensible to pain, who only replied, again and again:
"That is not true!"
The invading mob, after breaking everything in the castle it could lay its hands upon, began searching for young Széphalmi and the doctor.
They must have hidden well, for nowhere could they be found. The mob turned all the rooms upside down, and yet it could not find them.
The old man must certainly know where they were stowed away.
But Hétfalusy would not betray his son-in-law or the doctor.